It's ladies first in the struggle to control inflation

Women are the unwitting front-line troops in the battle against inflation - but only because most are too polite to barge into the boss's office and demand a pay rise.

This is the startling claim of DeAnne Julius, the only woman to sit on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee.

Her argument is that Britain has become a service-dominated economy, and services tend to have more female workers than there are in factories.

Now that manufacturing accounts for only a fifth of this country's output, the old Seventies image of aggressive pickets outside factory gates has been replaced by an army of waiters, carers and telesales folk.

Arguably, all these servants are less productive than their shop-floor counterparts, because more than half the UK workforce is in socalled market services - transport, communication, tourism and leisure, finance and business services - while accounting for just under half of total output.

However, they do not usually have machinery worth millions of pounds helping them, and collectively they have one huge trump card - flexibility.

Julius says: 'One of the key factors may be the ability of a large and competitive service sector to create jobs of all sorts - full-time, part-time, high-skill, low-skill - in response to changes in demand and supply in both product and labour markets.'

Previously, when the number of jobless fell, unions would demand higher wages and employers would have to raise pay to keep existing staff and/or attract recruits.

Not now. There has been a seem-ingly endless supply of women lining up for service jobs, and conveniently drifting in and out of the workplace to have children or for other personal reasons.

As many as a third of jobs in market services are part-time. In trade, tourism and leisure the proportion rises to 43%. More than half the people working in market services are women, and more than half of them are part-time.

Says Julius: 'Put more simply, if less politically correctly, the majority of people working in goods are men, while the majority working in services are women.'

The effects of the flexibility that women are bringing to the workplace are far-reaching. They may allow the economy to reach a higher level of employment without reigniting inflation, now somnolent at 2.4% a year.

That would help to cut taxes, because less public money would have to be spent on unemployment benefit. And it could keep interest rates lower.

Thank you, ladies.

LORD Marshall, the British Airways chairman, must rue the day he let Prime Minister Tony Blair talk him into running the Britain in Europe campaign, the cross-party group that is to run the sole pro-euro campaign in this country.

The very day of its official launch, March 15, was also the day that all 20 European Commissioners resigned after a damning report accused them of corruption and nepotism. Not exactly the sort of club I would want to join, where several of the committee have their fingers in the till.

And just 10 days later the highly respected Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published a scathing analysis of the three-month-old euro currency, now languishing at just over 66p after beginning the year at nearly 71p.

Like the little boy in the fable, the OECD, based in Paris, deep in euroland, points out that the emperor has no clothes.

In a statement that would have been blindingly obvious if its message had not been so studiously overlooked by the euro lobby, the OECD says that by fixing national exchange rates the 11 member countries have deprived themselves of an important mechanism for correcting problems.

It also lumbers the Continent with a single interest rate to take account of many very different economic situations.

Instead, taxes, unemployment and inflation have to take the strain because the euro labour market is too inflexible - not enough women working there, you see.